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US public schools banned 10k books in most recent academic year
Survey by PEN America suggests bans nearly tripled nationwide from previous year’s figure
At least 13 titles were banned for the first time, including Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which describes the journey of an enslaved person from Africa to the US, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, the acclaimed semi-autographical work set in Harlem, New York. PEN America, a non-profit organization dedicated to freedom of expression, said that approximately 8,000 instances of book bans took place in Florida and Iowa, as both states enforced sweeping laws targeting classroom material. Utah, in particular, has one of the “most extreme” bills, PEN America said, referring to the law HB 29, which says a book must be pulled from all schools in the state if at least three districts have found the title to be “objectively sensitive material”.
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